From Individual-Based Models to General Stochastic Reaction Diffusion Equations

Abstract

In this article, we construct, for a broad class of one-dimensional stochastic reaction-diffusion equations, a sequence of spatially-structured individual-based models whose rescaled empirical processes converge to the solution of the equation. The purpose of this article is to show that, whenever the rescaled one-step mean and variance of a reasonable individual-based model converge to those of an SDE with drift $b(x)x(1-x)+{\theta }^{+}(1-x)-{\theta }^{-}x$ and noise coefficient $\sqrt{\sigma (x)x(1-x)}$, under certain moment conditions there also exists a corresponding multi-island model, composed of independent and identically distributed copies of the individual-based model on each island, with selection and mutation scaled to the diffusive time scale, coupled through migration, which converges to an SPDE with a Laplacian plus the same drift and noise coefficients, provided this SPDE is unique in law.